"Just Like Heaven" by The Cure // Song Review

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"Just Like Heaven" is a standout from The Cure's seventh album, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, released in 1987, and became a turning point for the band. Not only did it become their eleventh UK Top 40 hit, but it also marked their first-ever Top 40 charting single in the United States, finally breaking them into the American mainstream. 

Over the decades since its release, "Just Like Heaven" become one of the most enduring tracks in their catalog, consistently appearing on various lists of the greatest songs of all time from publications like Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and VH1. In 2019, Billboard even named it the best song The Cure ever recorded.

Part of its longevity comes from the light, blissful spirit that it embodies. This is such a beautiful love song that feels so weightless and sincere. It opens with some of the most iconic lines in their discography that captures a universal feeling of being completely swept up in someone. "'Show me, show me, show me how you do that trick, the one that makes me scream,' she said 'The one that makes me laugh," she said and threw her arms around my neck," front man Robert Smith sings in the iconic opening lines of the song. "'Show me how you do it, and I promise you, I promise that I'll run away with you, I'll run away with you'". 


"It came to me on top of a cliff, in the south of England. A song that's very easy to understand. A lot of these songs  are easily understood, they're probably the easiest to understand that I've written," he said in a 1987 interview with French magazine Les Inrockuptibles. "This time I was very clear, sometimes too much." 

The song is "...about hyperventilating," Robert later said in a 2003 interview with Blender. "...kissing and fainting to the floor". The concept for the song was first inspired by a trip he took with his then-girlfriend and now wife, Mary Poole, to Beachy Head in southern England. "It's the best pop song The Cure have ever done," he added in the same interview. "All the sounds meshed, it was one take and it was perfect."

"You, soft and only, you, lost and lonely, you, strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans, twisting in the water," he sings in the chorus. "You're just like a dream, you're just like a dream".

It remains one of the sweetest, purest love songs ever written, part of a long string of incredible tracks the band would go on to release in the years that followed, including other timeless classics like "Friday I'm In Love" and "Lovesong". Truly, any lyric from it could be spotlighted for the way Robert Smith captures that bright, all‑consuming feeling of being so deeply in love with someone, and he does it with such effortlessness.



Check out more from my song of the week series here. ☆ Thanks for reading!



Photo Credit: Fiction Records, The Cure


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